Emma Holmes was a twenty-two year old woman when the Civil War began. The scion of a well-connected Charleston family, she had rejoiced when the Confederates had attacked Fort Sumter. She kept a diary from the weeks leading up to the firing on Fort Sumter until the Confederate surrenders and beyond into 1866. On April 22, 1865, after Lee’s surrender and after Lincoln’s murder, she wrote about the rumors of a negotiated settlement in which slavery would be maintained in exchange for the aid of former Confederates:
“we were…bewildered by hearing that negotiations for peace were arranged between the generals on the terms that we were to go back into the Union on the footing we had previously been, all our rights, privileges, property & negroes as far as possible on condition we would fight the French.
To go back into the Union!!! No words can describe all the horrors contained in those few words. Our souls recoiled shudderingly at the bare idea…The blood of our slain heroes cried out against such an end-as if end it could be. Peace on such terms is war for the rising generation…Our Southern blood rose in stronger rebellion than ever…” [The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes ed by John Marszalek p. 436-437]
Feature photo: Fort Sumter 1865
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What else did she have in mind?
WOW they were dedicated to their cause a
I’m not quite sure the woman understands what is going on around her.
“To the victor goes the spoils.”
Her emotional and mental reaction to the fact of the Union prevailing over the Confederacy in the Civil War/War Between the States were what they were. Thomas Morris Chester noted a number of similar depictions, especially among women devoted to the Southern war cause, as this in his articles for the ‘Philadelphia Press’, in immediate-post war Richmond, Virginia. That’s just one example.
But the article’s topic and the Chester clippings above are not necessarily ‘holistic’. It is important to recall that significant groups and figures from the former-Confederacy, though angry over their political and military loss, came to embrace a perspective of the result of the war that embraced the tenet of ‘Change’.
Generals’ William Mahone and James Longstreet are long-cited as examples of this.
Who inspired them to take this perspective? It was none other than General Robert E. Lee, whom on the eve of surrender, at night on 8 April 1865, called together his officer corps and extolled them to accept the reality of slavery being dead and gone forever. Moreover, he called upon them to return to their homes and give their efforts to the new order of things, (“..to go to work”, as he said it). It was also Lee who personally counselled Longstreet to accept slavery’s end.
The Lost Cause HID this about General Lee, in no small manner or extent.
Probably why Robt. Lee is more venerated than Jefferson Davis…